Inside Italy’s Illegal Horse Street Racing

TIME magazine has recently exposed the horrors of the underground street horse racing in Sicily. The horse racing is largely operated by the mafia, which has seen legal gambling revenue devastated in the last four years as 40% of the countries legal stables have shut their doors. The horses are truly the ones who suffer in this illegal sport, every horse raced on the hard asphalt streets have had the nerves in their legs cut so they do not feel pain. With no oversight, they are drugged with every drug that can possibly make them run faster. They are raced hard until they are no longer winning, and then slaughtered and the meat sold to local restaurants, after strong encouragement from the mafia.

As the sun rises over Palermo, a stretch of asphalt is transformed into a racetrack where yet another clandestine horse race is set to begin. The early hour, with its quiet roads and shuttered shops, provides a haven from passersby and, most importantly, the police. Horses paw the ground, moving nervously, spooked by the shouts of spectators and the sound of car horns.

Welcome to Fast and Furious, Sicilian-style, where horses are the cars that are exploited, abused, doped, forced to run to exhaustion and then thrown away. The past three years have seen a dramatic rise in illegal horse racing on the streets of… Time Magazine

Sign up for our E-Mail List

Content You’ll ❤

Copyright (C) 2017 News of the Horse, a subsidiary of Animal News, LLC. All content and articles are editorial in nature and are the sole opinion of the writer.Powered by ionMag news theme

Please support News of the Horse by disabling your ad blocking for our website. While we understand the irritation of advertisements, ads are how we pay the hosting bills to bring your quality news every day.

Subscribe to News of the Horse

Subscribe to our email newsletter today to receive the latest horse and equestrian news from around the world!

Thanks for signing up. We know you will enjoy our newsletter!

We respect your privacy. Our mailing system is powered by MailChimp to keep your information secure. We hate spam as much as you do!